Transvision

New release

Improved the setup process for devs, just launch start.sh after cloning the repository and it will set up everything and launch a Transvision instance locally. Setting up Transvision locally for development takes now about 20mn with a fast DSL connection.

Worked with Keko on adding a new translation memory export format which allows importing an existing Mozilla localization effort supported by Transvision into OmegaT (an offline localization tool in Java).

Worked with my intern Théo on his Locale status view, our numbers are mostly consistent with the official l10n dashboard but with a different aggregation approach that will allow to expose strings by product and category (/ex, expose the status of devtools localization in Firefox, or group Firefox strings with Firefox content hosted on mozilla.org). Still a lot to do on the perf side for this page (http://transvision.mozfr.org/showrepos/) since it relies heavily on regexes on 10s of thousands of strings (page load is about 15s without caching, 4s with caching). Théo will do another internship next summer with us, so stay tuned.

Improved extraction of strings to not escape systematically special characters and html at string extraction. That allows searching for strings with html markup or reserved characters in HTML (for example: &BrandShortName; or searching for \n codes in strings.

All commits to master are now continuously integrated on the beta site via GitHub webhooks (beta site had to be manually updated before)

Many smaller improvements to exiting views

Work in progress related to Transvision

Created a standalone library to be used initially in Transvision to extract all changesets from hg/git/svn repositories in the same format, so as to be able to dig contribution data in a uniform way

Working on an internal directory built dynamically from our logs, coupled with the vcs library it will allow us to provide our core localizers stats to the CBT team via an external API. Also works as a CLI tool for my own use.

Working on a Product class for Transvision that allows to query strings per software and not per repository (important for desktop because there are a lot of strings shared between Firefox and Thunderbird).

Overall, I worked a lot on Transvision during Q3 but very little during Q4. There was a good balance of improvements targetting our different users (localizers, Transvision devs, API consumers) and we did some solid improvements to both the code and our workflow to ship faster in 2015. We also had 8 people contributing to the codebase over the semester and several people popping in our IRC channel asking about the project, which is good. I have several big patches with good potential in branches but unfortunately I didn't have time to work on finishing them in Q4 and it seems I won't be able to work on them either in Q1, maybe in Q2.

I updated the overview status showing the number of untranslated strings per locales with a summary ranking locales status and also showing locales on locamotion it also now counts strings for all projects on the wbedashboard, not just mozilla.org.

I added the number of strings, words and files to the summary view since this is something we got asked for often from other teams.

Google Play copy localization back into a normal l10n process

Historically, the process of publishing updates to the Firefox page on Google Play has been owned by many different people, most if not all of them no longer working for Mozilla. So there was no real formal process to update the copy and get that copy translated. Sylvestre Ledru (Debian core dev that recently joined the Mozilla Release Management team) decided to establish a process with as much automation as possible via the Google Play API to update our copy in English when we ship a new release and I decided to also help on this front to get that content localized and published simultaneaously with English.

So now the process of translating the copy is back to the l10n-drivers team with our own tools (means tracking, dashboards, integration to the translation platforms we use…).

I created a small app to track and QA translations without pushing to Google Play.

And I also created an associated JSON API that release drivers can use.

I am working with Sylvestre on getting release drivers tools automatically update our localized listings along with the en-US copy. We hope to get that working and functionnal in Q1 and be able to always have an updated copy for all of our supported locale for Firefox on Google Play from now on.

Thunderbird web localization migrating to Bedrock (mozilla.org)

This is localization management work that I am doing as a volunteer as Mozilla does not put paid resources on Thunderbird. My colleague Flod is also helping, as well as Théo (my intern and French localizer) and Kohei Yoshino (ex Mozilla Japan webdev and ex mozilla.org localizer, now living in Canada and still contributing to www.mozilla.org at the code level).

Thunderbird web content is still hosted on the old mozilla.org framework, this content is not actively maintained by anybody and that framework will eventually disappear. The l10n process is also broken there. For Thunderbird 10th anniversary, I volunteered to help manage the key content for Thunderbird on our current platform (Bedrock) so as that Thunderbird in-product pages can get updated and translated. If you use Thunderbird, you may have seen the new version of the start page (some people noticed).

A few notes though:

If you are a Mozilla localizer but are not interested in translating Thunderbird content, please don't translate it even if you see that on your locale dashboard, help us find a person to do these translations for Thunderbird in you language instead!

I am not volunteering to manage Thunderbird product localization, I just don't have enough time for that. If you want to help on that front, please contact the new Thunderbird team leaders, they will be happy to get help on that front!

23 locales have translated the page, thanks to you guys! If your locale is not done and you want to get involved in Mozilla Web localization, please contact me! (pascal AT mozilla DOT com)

Community building

I try to spend as much time as I can actively finding new localizers and growing our localization community with core contributors that help us ship software and projects. It's great to build tools and we are always happy when we can improve by 20% the productivity of a localizer with a new process or tool, but when we find a new core localizer for a language, we get a lot more than a 20% productivity boost ;). After all, we build tools for people to use them.

Here is a list of countries where I found new core localizers:

Portugal:

We now have a webmaster for mozilla.pt (hosted on mozfr.org), Joao, a Portuguese volunteer involved in the Rust language

Luis Mourão joined the team as a technical localizer

Claudio Esperança, is now an svn committer

Bulgaria

New Bulgarian web localizer, Miroslav Yovchev. Miroslav did an awesome job with one of his friends getting mozilla.org which was very outdated in Bulgarian in a decent shape. He also corrected many existing pages for consistency of style.

I met with my colleague Pavel Ivanov in Portland who is Bulgarian and works on Gaia so as that we can see how we can help grow the Bulgarian community next year, not just in l10n.

Latvia

New Latvian localizer for webparts: Jānis Marks Gailis. Latvian does not have many speakers and historically we had only one localizer (Raivis Deijus) focused on products, so now we can say that we have a team spanning both products and web sites. A third person would be welcome of course

Croatia

New Croatian localizer Antun Koncic. Antun used to be the Croatian dictionary packager for Thunderbird and was no longer involved in Mozilla, welcome back then!

Poland

We have a new Polish localizer, Piotr Nalepa that is helping us with web content

Joanna Mazgaj, long term Polish contributor in aviary.pl is also now a committer for mozilla.org

We could use the help of a couple more people for Polish, especially to translate products and technical content, if you are interested, please leave a comment

Like a thousand more Mozilla employees and many volunteers, I spent a work week in Portland, USA where I met several localizers we had invited. It was the first time I was meeting some of these localizers IRL, in particular people from India and Bangladesh. That was nice.

Privacy Coach Add-on

In parallel to the 10 years of Mozilla, we created and launched a Firefox for Android extension called Privacy Coach teaching users how to set up privacy settings in their browser.

I worked with Margaret Leibovic on that project and I reused the code and process that I had used for the add-ons we had created during the Australis launch earlier this year to translate the add-on while it was being developped. The idea is that it shouldn't be discruptive for either localizers or developers.

We worked with .lang files that were automatically converted to the right set of dtd/properties files for the extension along with the packaging of the locale into the extension (update of install.rdf/chrome.manifest/locale folder) that were integrated into the extenson via pull requests on github during its development. We got 12 locales done which is more than the 8 locales initially planned. Two locales we wanted to get we didn't in the end (Hungarian and Indonesian) so they are part of the locales I will work with in Q1 to get more people.

Various Web projects

Firefox Tiles: prepared the project as a .lang one with Mathjazz, prepopulated translations and launched with Mathjazz for all locales

Worked with flod on New home page and new contribute pages for mozilla.org

10 years of Mozilla: Flod was the lead on this project and blogged about it in his own Q4 report, basically my main role there was to help find localizers for the project, all the merit of the project from the l10n POV goes to flod

Other

I created a GitHub organization for our team and moved several of my projects there. I felt that we needed to have a place for us to have all the tools we use for shipping in one common place where we could create projects whenever we need them instead of using our personal accounts.

I transferred the womoz.org domain to Flore Allemandou now leading the Women in Mozilla community (I had been paying for it since 2009) and Flore is working on getting the domain owned and paid by Mozilla

I helped the French community (with Théo and Natalia from the Marketing team) set up a promotional Firefox OS site focused on end-users (created the github project, did a temporary version of the site until the French community built a design and content to replace it and took care of setting up some continous integration to allow people to publish code and text updates without me merging and pushing to production).

Summary of what I did last quarter (regular l10n-drivers work such as patch reviews, pushes to production, meetings and past projects maintenance excluded) .Australis release At the end of April, we shipped Firefox 29 which was our first major redesign of the Firefox user interface since Firefox 4

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